Thursday, October 20, 2005
I've cleaned up my desk -- see pic -- and it's time to get focused. I have way too many domains and I definately should take a different action than I have to date in dealing with names to let go. My routine was to just wait till the expiration date or just after and make a decision whether to drop the domains or renew. Now with the latest moves by many registrars to cut back the grace periods (the time afforded registrants after the expiration of a domain to renew) from the lofty levels of 42 days in the past, now down to 18 days by GoDaddy and others, I'm being pushed to look at this stuff earlier if I don't want to lose them. I hear Domainsite and other registrars that participated in the free info promo last year are sending the delete button on the expiration date now and providing NO grace period at all. Even worse, the rumor is that Enom is hitting the delete button BEFORE the domains expire and Netsol is marking ALL domain extensions as "expired" a day in advance of when they actually expire. The reason for a lot of this is the cherry picking of names by the registrars from their own customer's accounts and the sale at auction at higher amounts. Nothing done about it by ICANN or the registries as they don't appear to care about the registrants who are feeding this whole thing, but rather consider the registrar as their customer.
Besides, I should be running in advance of expirations to identify possible sales, so I could make a buck to help cover renewals. Kills me when I see names I let go getting picked up in the auctions at Snapnames etc. Like I said, I need to get focused anyways. So lining up all my names according to expiration date and selecting keepers that more fit my development plans will be the goal.
We'll see how it goes today.